Andrew England is a PhD student in the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. His PhD project is focused on the fatigue properties of structural steel welds in the very high cycle and gigacycle regimes. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Strathclyde with an MEng in Mechanical Engineering. During his studies he developed an interest in material science after completing a project focused on ultrasonic fatigue testing. His other areas of interest include welding, metallurgy, residual stress, and computer aided engineering design.
Abstract
It has been demonstrated in industrial case studies and the technical literature that the assumption of a fatigue limit is not valid for steel welds, with fatigue failures occurring in the gigacycle (1 billion stress cycle) regime. Structures and components across a range of industries have service lives above 107 cycles, but there is limited fatigue data in this domain. Conducting fatigue tests in the gigacycle regime is only feasible by using ultrasonic fatigue testing machines in which specimens are excited at 20 kHz.
This research focuses on butt joints of S275 structural steel, fabricated using gas-shielded flux-core arc welding. A novel specimen was produced which captures the geometric stress concentration at the weld toe, as an alternative to typically used cylindrical hourglass shaped specimens. Specimens were tested in fully reversed axial loading at room temperature using a Shimadzu USF-2000A commercial ultrasonic fatigue testing machine, up to the gigacycle regime. An elevated fatigue strength is often observed with ultrasonic fatigue testing for materials with a ferritic microstructure, a phenomenon known as the frequency effect. Therefore, specimens with the same gauge geometry were tested at 20 Hz using a conventional servo-hydraulic machine. This study presents the fatigue data obtained at both ultrasonic and conventional loading frequencies alongside complementary metallography, microhardness and fractography results.
Session
| Room | Date | Hour | Subject |
|---|---|---|---|
| Room 9 | Wednesday 29th November | 18:00-18:30 | Andrew England S08-2 Fatigue and manufacturing process 97 - Gigacycle fatigue performance of structural steel welds |
